Time Tracking

August 29th, 2005

After many years of trying to find the best way to track my time I’ve used many different methods. I’ve gone from writing everything down on a piece of paper to trying out all the latest and greatest of time tracking applications. Sure, most of them are really great. Some of them are even borderline outstanding but there is one problem with all of them. They all want to do too much.

Sure, I can understand why all the developers out there want to bring in more customers by offering more features but at what expense? Seems to me that everything I’ve got for my particular workflow has only fit in adequately. That’s why I keep switching. I feel no loyalty to any time tracking app in the market today. There has been nothing that stands head and shoulders above the rest. It’s come to the point where it looks like I’m going to have to do it on my own if I want it done right.

Before we get to the lists, you’ll have to forgive my schoolboy attitude in repeating the 37signals mentality but it does hold merit for my needs and thus I feel it’s well warranted.

The Competition

  • TimeLog
  • Billings
  • TaskCapture
  • Studiometry

The Requirements

  • Either system wide hot key to show/hide timer window or easily hidden/minimized (or on the dashboard – this would be sweet)
  • Run multiple timers at once in one window
  • Edit all times, even after they have been completed/punched out/checked out/assigned to projects
  • Similar tasks can be grouped, which would total the hours worked on those tasks
  • It only tracks the time — I don’t need the weather in Hawaii or even invoicing, there are other apps I use for that
  • Exportable as XML/PDF/HTML/whatever (pick one, two, or more)
  • Integration with iCal/Basecamp/Blinksale/Quicken/etc. (not exaclty necessary but would be nice)

The Plea

I may just be going off my rocker but it seems that while some or all of the apps listed do many of the things I’m looking for, none of them do everything I’m asking for well. This is where I call upon you, good readers, do you use any of the apps listed above? Do they work in the ways that I’m looking for but I just haven’t figured it out yet?

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Reader comments

  1. Gravatar

    On August 29th, 2005, Chris Ruzin said:

    Thanks for pointing out Billings to me. I had never heard of it before, so I gave it a try. After messing around with it for about half an hour, I don’t think I’ll be using it. I like the clean interface, but it’s not easy to adjust times/dates and other things.

    Have you tried iRatchet (http://www.prettygoodsoftware.org/)? I switched to it from iBiz. It’s still a young app, but it’s showing a lot of promise. The developer is very friendly and actually listens to the feedback and feature requests he receives.

    Anyway, something else for you to try out.

  2. On August 30th, 2005, Mike said:

    Chris, thanks for the heads up about iRatchet. I took a quick look at it and a couple things got me right off the start.

    • Immediately after launching the app a very large version of the icon was plastered to my screen and it stayed in front of everything — sometimes after launching apps I’ll switch to the browser and read something. This was very annoying to say the least
    • I have to create a new task/to-do/item in the project window before I can start a timer (Billings and some others let you start timing first and assign an item later)
    • The timer that appears in the menubar, when you’re timing yourself, is constantly spinning!! Talk about your visual distractions

    Those are just a couple things I noticed. Granted I only had the program open for all of 5 minutes so there is the argument that I could get used to them. I don’t forsee that happening though.

    On the other hand:

    • The interface is quite nice — everything is well laid out, the icons are nice
    • Address Book integration is superb, adding clients was a snap

    That being said, I’m still on the lookout.

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